Random

New Pew Report Shows ‘Decline of Christianity’ Leveling Off – But Church Remains Strong

A new Pew Research Center study indicates that the apparent “decline of Christianity” in the United States “shows signs of leveling off – at least temporarily.” Their massive report shows “evidence both of a long-term decline in American religion and of relative stability in the last few years, since 2020 or so.”

Their data simply examines how many Americans personally identify as “Christian” or with some other faith category.

From 2007 to 2019, the number of people who say they identify as “Christian” decreased from 78% to 63%. It has fluctuated between 64% and 62% since then. Pew explains that “for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%.”

They add,

Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys.

Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity remains very low, but is inching up slightly, possibly due to immigration and a diversifying population rather than actual changes in beliefs of American citizens.

Nones – those identifying with no particular faith – plateaued in recent years according to Pew’s data.

Now, mere identity with a particular faith is not a very robust measure of the actual health of that faith.  People choose to identify or dis-identify with a name for various reasons beyond strongly held faith convictions and practices. Still, this new Pew data does indicate “rates of prayer, attendance at religious services also [are] relatively stable.” Younger generations have shown less faith adherence.

According to Pew, “the youngest adults in the survey (ages 18 to 24) are less likely than today’s oldest adults (ages 74 and older) to:

  • Identify as Christian (46% versus 80%)
  • Pray daily (27% versus 58%)
  • Say they attend religious services at least monthly (25% versus 49%).”

“Since 2020, however, our surveys indicate that the religiousness of most birth cohorts has remained relatively stable.”

One thing we must all remember is that the same Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth – whom Jesus promised would guide every generation into Truth is just as much at work today as He was at Pentecost, or any age since. He has not grown old, tired, weak or out of touch. As I explain in the final chapter of my book, The Myth of the Dying Church, “the Holy Spirit is not asleep at the wheel.” He continues to barrel through human history like a freight train, drawing people to the truth and regeneration of Jesus Christ.

We read as much in the conclusion of Scripture itself,

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10, ESV).

The Christian Church throughout history and the world is right on track. Just as the cells of every living person multiply every minute of every day, so do the cells that make up the body of Christ. It can’t be otherwise because the life of the Holy Spirit is life-giving.

Do not let incomplete, momentary news reports from polling organizations threaten this hope.

Related Articles and Resources

The Church’s Lane is the Whole Cosmos

The Cultural Paradox of Following Jesus Christ

Why Believe in Christianity? Because it is True.

How Big is Your View of the Gospel?

Dear Christian, Have Hope in Jesus Christ Amid Our Cultural Chaos

Appreciating the Full Scope of the Lordship of Christ – and the Gospel Itself

Christianity is Both a Religion and a Relationship

Against the Prosperity Gospel

Is Another Trump Era a Threat to the Gospel?

How in-Utero Diagnosis Is Being Used to Push Abortion

Imagine you’re an expecting mother, and you’ve just received the heartbreaking news that your unborn baby has a chromosomal disorder, and your doctor says it’s fatal. The doctor explains that an abortion would be the quickest solution, and that without one, your baby will die anyway in perinatal hospice. These are the only options presented.  

It’s cruel and unreasonable to expect a mother or father in this situation to realize they’re being misled. But in a disturbing number of cases, that’s exactly what happens.   

A recent report by the National Catholic Bioethics Center on Health Care and Life Sciences documented how physicians are often reticent about prognosis of children diagnosed in the womb with supposedly fatal disorders. Sixty-one percent of parents who received such a diagnosis said they felt pressured to abort, and in 39 states, “fatal fetal anomalies” and “non-viability” are legal justification to do just that.   

The problem is that, as the report puts it, “there is no universally accepted definition of a lethal or fatal fetal anomaly.” Diagnoses generally classified as “fatal” include “trisomy 13 and 18, severe brain malformations, conditions leading to lung underdevelopment, and absent or severely damaged kidneys.” Yet roughly half of children born with these conditions survive their first 12 months, and many live for years.  

Other conditions, like Down Syndrome, are compatible with “decades of survival” yet often result in pressure by physicians to abort or even withhold life-saving care. That may be why between 67% and 85% of such diagnoses result in termination.  

In reality, many of these supposedly “fatal” diagnoses aren’t reliable. The New York Times reported back in 2022 that false positives are incredibly common with prenatal tests for a number of chromosomal disorders, with screenings for a few conditions returning false positives 60-90% of the time! 

Worse, parents hit with this news are often told all sorts of inaccurate things. When surveyed, 57% of moms and dads who received a prenatal diagnosis said healthcare providers told them that if their child survived, he or she would live a life of suffering. Half were told their child would be a vegetable and live a meaningless life. And 23% were warned that giving birth to their disabled child would ruin their marriage or family. 

Parents who choose not to abort when anomalies are detected before birth are frequently pressured into perinatal hospice, which is where infants go to die naturally. But often, this leads to newborns being denied life-saving care that would be given to any other infant, contributing, ironically, to the supposed “lethality” of their conditions. 

As the author of the bioethics report, Dr. Martin McCaffrey, put it, these diagnoses have become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: 

If physicians say a condition is lethal, it becomes lethal. When parents are counseled that a prenatal diagnosis is fatal, and offered no hope for supportive medical interventions, they are left to choose between abortion and perinatal hospice. … Lethality begets lethality. 

The damning fact exposed by this report is that too many healthcare providers are functioning like self-appointed eugenicists, dictating to parents which little lives are worth living and which are not. This perpetuates misinformation around children with chromosomal and other disorders, all of whose lives, however long or short, are precious in the sight of God.  

This has to stop. Thankfully, reports like this move us in the right direction, exposing the word games played with terms like “fatal,” “lethal,” “terminal,” and “compatible with a meaningful life.” These games are played at both ends of life, justifying abortion and infanticide on one hand and assisted suicide and euthanasia on the other. 

Doctors need to be honest and “fulfill their duty to offer parents informed consent.” It’s their job to heal, not to kill. And it’s certainly not their job to exaggerate or lie about the lethality of conditions when they believe children who have them are better off dead. Many already know this, but too many, apparently, do not.  

Parents also have a crucial role to play by staying informed and insisting healthcare providers give them the true accuracy of prenatal tests. They should also know that hospice isn’t the only option. As the report concludes, those with children who have life-limiting disorders have every right to demand their children be stabilized, evaluated, and otherwise given the reasonable, life-saving treatment offered to other infants. Parents don’t have to give in to the pressure of self-fulfilling prophecies.  

Lastly, all of us, whether we have a child with disabilities or not, must insist upon a culture that welcomes human life as a gift. The ugliness of encouraging parents to kill their newborns is born of a lie: that human beings are products to be optimized or returned if “defective.” But we’ve seen where this lie leads. It leads to a world where no one is safe from the fibs of physicians playing God. We should prefer a world where more people respond to suffering with the words of God’s Son: “Let the little children come to me.” 

The Important Parenting Differences Between Moms and Dads

We know that mothers and fathers are fundamentally different when it to comes to creating children. Everyone knows that no one exists without a major contribution from a mother and a father. The difference in moms and dads is essential to successful procreation.

It’s an interesting contradiction that many people believe the difference in mom and dad ends there. They honestly believe there is no real meaningful difference between men and women when it comes to parenting. This is what is behind the simplistic and relativistic claim “Love makes a family!”

This assumption is contrary to an overwhelming body of careful medical, psychological and social science research on the importance of mothers and fathers to healthy child development.

Yale University’s Kyle D. Pruett is one of the leading scholars doing foundational work on mother/father differences in parenting. Writing in the medical journal Pediatrics in 1998, Professor Pruett explains that children, from earliest ages, can distinguish between whether it is their mother or father interacting with them and are drawn to either’s unique nature depending on their needs.

Babies aged seven to 13 months tend to respond more excitedly to being held by their fathers because father-love is simply more stimulating, thrilling and unpredictable.

Mother-love tends to be more predictable and soothing. This is essential for children’s development. Moms hold their babies for caregiving and comfort, while fathers are far more likely to pick up their children for play, using more verbal, facial, and physical stimulation.

Pruett explains the obvious difference, “Fathers’ typically larger size, deeper voice, courser skin, smell, physical attributes, and habits all combine to offer a distinctively different buffet of potential attachment behaviors.”

In more recent research, a systematic review of 31 separate research investigations on mom/dad parenting styles from over 15 countries around the globe, reports,

Our findings reveal that mothers as compared to fathers are perceived as more accepting, responsive, and supportive, as well as more behaviorally controlling, demanding, and autonomy granting than fathers…

This research also found that mothers and fathers were different in how they directed the behavior of their children, with mothers being more relational and fathers being more rule-based.

“These findings accord with the notion that in the context of child-rearing in the family, mothers play a more nurturing role while fathers play a more protective role.”

Dr. Natasha Cabrera, professor of human development at the University of Maryland, explains, “The research that I have been doing for the last twenty years now … what we observe is that fathers make a unique contribution to children’s development, which means it is not the same as moms’.”

She adds, “Moms, we do our thing, and dads do their thing and both things are super important for children’s development.”

Comfort, Confidence and Care

A major difference in what fathers and mothers bring to the lives of their children is the building of comfort and confidence, two essential qualities of healthy human development.

Fathers supply an indirect, but very real, sense of comfort by building confidence in their children. They do this in their unique orientation to the child. Mothers are generally more child-focused.

Fathers are different. They tend to have a world-child focus. Mothers are interested in protecting their child from the world. Fathers are more likely to introduce their child to the opportunities and challenges of the world. This prepares children for the world.

Therefore, father’s more expectant and broader interaction with the child has a very positive impact on a child’s ability to self-regulate in various challenging situation. This builds a sense of essential security that is distinct from how mom provides caring comfort.

Just consider how moms and dads are different in the importance of play.

Child’s Play is Serious Business

Erik Erikson, a pioneering child-development theorist, says that play for the child is the development of a sense of industry. They are imitating the adult world of work and accomplishment. This is essential to healthy development. While mother helps children play in the home at various tasks, it is father who helps his child really explore the larger outside world.

Think of a parent encouraging his child to climb higher in a tree or on playground equipment.

Run faster, jump higher or further, take risks. Is that likely to be mom or dad? We all know it’s dad. This encouragement builds confidence, physical skills and self-regulation. Dad helps the child take safe risks that often provide exciting payoffs. The challenging experience is usually followed by a congratulatory, hugely confidence-building “You did it!”

Both father and child are thrilled, while mother wonders why risk was necessary in the first place. It is very necessary.

Father-play is also more likely to develop large-motor-skills in their children, while mother-play operates more in fine-motor-skills. Think jumping, climbing, rolling, running and diving versus cutting, coloring, dressing, tying, eating and finger-play.

Throwing Babies

Think about babies being thrown in the air. It happens all over the world. We know a few things about this phenomenon. Babies are scared to death going up, but giggly excited when they land back in secure hands. This experience demonstrates the world can be scary, but it can also be exciting. That is why a child almost always yells “again!” after the experience.

The second thing we know is it is seldom mother who throws babies. Dads, uncles and grandfathers do this. And they are building confidence by introducing their children to controlled risk-taking experiences that result in exciting payoffs. This is an essential quality in secure, successful human beings.  

Language

Moms and dads are also different when it comes to language development.

One of the first things we do in relationship is we speak. We use words to connect. Nearly every new parent does two things at the arrival of their child, and these continue throughout that child’s life. They hold their new baby and speak to them. At birth, this is a profound moment. What parent doesn’t immediately look into their child’s opening eyes and naturally say, “Hello little one!” or “Welcome to the world ” and call out their name?

Professor Cabrera tells us, “One key example [of mother/father difference] is in language development.”

Back in the day, we would think that fathers talk to the children as adults, and that that’s bad. But in fact, what we find is that fathers talking to their children use complex and diverse words. That linguistic input is very important for children’s language development because fathers tend to be more linguistically challenging to their children than moms.

This is supported by other scholars who have studied the difference in mother/father communication with their children. Fathers tend to be more direct with their children in their requests, but are also more likely to ask compound questions, introducing many concepts for the child to consider. They don’t speak down to the level of the child as much. This builds confidence, critical thinking skills and a vocabulary lesson. This is why children who are well fathered tend to show up to school with richer linguistic skills.

Conclusion

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that mothers and fathers are essentially the same or optional for the family. They are not. Dr. Pruett, later in his career, explained in his book Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently,

… [R]esearch has shown just how important involved men are to raising healthy children, increasing the chance that they will be healthier emotionally and socially, strong cognitively and academically, and stable throughout their lifetime.

This is why he states, “Fathers are not substitute mothers.”

Kids need both mother and father to be created, but also to grow into healthy, productive human beings and citizens.

Related Articles and Resources

Important New Research on How Married Parents Improve Child Well-Being

Family Scholars Explain the Current Marriage Paradox in America

New Research Shows Married Families Matter More Than Ever

Important New Book Explains Why Marriage Still Matters

Why Marriage Really Matters – 3 Focus on the Family Reports

Reclaiming the Truth About Marriage

Research Update: The Compelling Health Benefits of Marriage

Brad Wilcox Exhorts Young People to ‘Get Married’

New Research: Marriage Still Provides Major Happiness Premium

Cohabitation Still Harmful – Even as Stigma Disappears

Don’t Believe the Modern Myth. Marriage Remains Good for Women

Don’t Believe the Modern Myth. Marriage Remains Good for Men.

Yes, Married Mothers Really Are Happier Than Unmarried and Childless Women

Married Mothers and Fathers Are Happiest According to Gold-Standard General Social Survey

Married Fatherhood Makes Men Better

Marriage and the Public Good: A New Manifesto of Policy Proposals

DOT Secretary Sean Duffy Officially Favors Marriage and Fertility in Federal Policy

Newly-seated Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy has already gotten busy improving his department, and America by ensuring the nation’s traffic policy protects and promotes families.

A new order issued by Secretary Duffy requires all DOT policies, programs and activities, as much as possible, to be determined and executed relative to their “benefits for families and communities.”

To this end, Secretary Duffy declares DOT “shall prioritize projects and goals” focusing on helping “families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average [emphasis added].”

This is a profoundly wise federal policy development that Focus on the Family strongly supports.

Communities with higher than average marriage and birth rates are clearly some of the strongest communities in our nation because they are more likely to capitalize on the protective and life-enhancing benefits of marriage. Decades of university-based social science and medical research consistently demonstrate that children benefit in every important measure of well-being when they are born to and raised by their own married mother and father.

Growing, healthy, thriving children are the future of our nation.

For any country to grow, its citizens must have enough babies to boost that nation over basic replacement level of 2.1 children per family. The U.S. has fallen under this important marker, to 1.7 births per woman.

Economists demonstrate this decline has been particularly dramatic in the last two decades.

Simply put, America cannot sustain itself with this level of natality without aggressively importing citizens from other nations. The world has already passed what demographers call “peak child” – a truly ominous milestone where fewer and fewer babies will be born each and every year.

So this is extremely wise national policy incentivizing marriage and married fertility. The Institute for Family Studies has explained, in great detail, many of the compelling reasons why such policies like the DOT’s will benefit families and the nation.

Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, one of the world’s leading sociologists of marriage and family, explains, “Secretary Duffy’s move … is a very big deal.”

He notes “we don’t typically think of DOT spending as family policy, but it is.” This is because,

DOT transportation spending has often been directed toward large, urban transportation projects that end up favoring denser and more urban communities. From a family-friendly perspective, the problem is that such denser development is associated with lower family formation — less marriage and fewer children.

Professor Wilcox adds,

Insofar as Duffy’s policy prioritizes communities with higher marriage and birth rates, it is likely to reorient transportation dollars to lower-density communities where there are more single-family homes, family life is often more affordable, and family formation is higher.

The Secretary’s order also states that “DOT shall ensure comprehensive public engagement … with families” and other vital community stakeholders. This is more productive than attacking and becoming suspicious of concerned parents as we saw in the previous Presidential administration.


Let us hope that more heads of federal departments follow Secretary Duffy’s wise and bold approach to make it easier for married mother and fathers to build and maintain every nation’s greatest resource: families.

Image from Getty.

Is God Having a Cultural Moment?

God seems to be having a moment, culturally speaking. So is the Bible, it seems.

In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bible sales were up 22% in the U.S. last year, while sales of other books were essentially flat. In fact, in 2019, 9.7 million copies of the Bible were sold in America. Last year, that number approached 14 million, with most sales driven by “first-time buyers.” 

Then there is football, with Ohio State players preaching to students last summer and on national television after winning the national championship, Boise State head coach Spencer Danielson praising Jesus at the Fiesta Bowl, and Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh leading his team in the Lord’s Prayer, God-talk on and off the field has been conspicuous this season.

Or consider the “moment” God is having among secular thought leaders. Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk, recognizing the importance of Christianity to the West, have labeled themselves “cultural Christians.” Former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali experienced and defended a conversion to Christian faith, as did her husband, well-known historian and Hoover Institute fellow Niall Ferguson. Former atheist and popular historian Tom Holland’s bestselling book has changed the narrative about the positive role Christianity has played in making the Western world. Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson often references Scripture and just released a 500-page book attempting to draw lessons and meaning from the Old Testament. And, of course, podcaster Joe Rogan recently interviewed Christian apologist Wesley Huff for his 14 million subscribers.

Justin Brierley, co-host of the “Unbelievable” podcast and author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, thinks we are seeing something significant:

“[T]hey say God moves in mysterious ways. I see signs that he is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognizing that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead.”

Brierley thinks this “wider turning of the secular tide in the West,” is a result of secularism’s failed predictions. A couple decades ago, the New Atheists promised a rational utopia in the wake of religious decline. Instead, we got a crisis of meaning, widespread “confusion, a mental health crisis in the young, and the culture wars.” Now, a “New Theist” movement has sprung up, and even those not converting to Christ have toned down the anti-Christian rhetoric. Some are even suggesting that faith is good for the world. 

Still, Brierley cautions that what we’re seeing is far from a revival. Many of the “cultural Christians” of our moment are not believers, nor are they claiming to be. There’s a big difference in regarding Christianity as a “useful fiction,” able to restore vigor and cohesion to the West, and submitting to it as the ultimate truth which demands our allegiance and devotion. For the millions of new Bible owners, the difference is between looking for sage advice and looking for God. Neither a better world nor a better you is what Christianity fundamentally offers. 

Though a “vibe shift” in favor of religion is welcome, and cultural Christianity is genuinely a good thing, Christ does not claim to be “useful.” He claims to be the risen Son of God and King of kings, before whom every knee must bow. Those hoping to make Him “useful” overlook that the West did not become a great civilization because people believed Christianity offered good advice, but because they believed it was true. Anyone who tries to use the God of the Bible to some earthly end will only be repeating the blunder of Mainline Protestantism, not doing something genuinely new or important.

At the same time, the truth about Christ is compelling. Thus, the renewed interest of this cultural moment can be welcomed and celebrated. Secularism has failed to satisfy the human soul or build the utopia that was promised. But Christ will not fail, not in this world nor in the age to come. Our task is to point insistently to the full and glorious truth of His rule and reign. 

We can direct the curious to resources like The Bible Project, or Graeme Goldsworthy’s classic book, According to Plan, both of which explain what the Bible is and what it teaches. Proven apologetic classics like C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and the timeless accounts of conversion like St. Augustine’s Confessions are incredibly helpful resources for those willing to give God a new look. Most importantly, the Church must be the Church, with the Word faithfully taught and lived. After all, we know that God’s Word will not return void, and He is at work through His people in this and every cultural moment.